


Sacrifices

by juniperberry



Category: Tokyo Babylon, xxxHoLic
Genre: Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-18
Updated: 2021-02-18
Packaged: 2021-03-13 12:16:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29526276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/juniperberry/pseuds/juniperberry
Summary: Watanuki meets Hokuto.  They have a talk.
Kudos: 5





	Sacrifices

**Author's Note:**

> Another 2006-ish-maybe-2007-era ficlet. This was written largely because Hokuto always seems to get the short end, and I love her and wanted to write her.

Kimihiro rubbed his eye. He had seen girls dressed in a lot of things—school uniforms, kimono, summer yukata, sundresses, and all sorts of things—but he’d never seen a girl dressed quite like this.

The skirt was very short, and the blouse was very long, with diamond-patterned sleeves. She had on high knee stockings and her hair was short and loose, save for two small, gathered buns tied with blue ribbons. Her eyes were very green.

“Oh!” She said. “You’re Watanuki Kimihiro, right?”

“Er,” he said. “Yes, I am. Do I…know you?”

“Nope,” she sang. “But you can call me Hokuto, okay?”

“Ah,” Kimihiro said. “Hokuto-san.”

She shook her head wildly. “No, no, no! Hokuto! Not ‘Hokuto-san,’ you make me feel like I’m talking to my grandmother.”

“Hokuto…chan?”

She crossed her arms and huffed. “Well,” she said, “that’s better than nothing.”

“Ah.” What else could he say? This girl was almost as bad as Doumeki when it came to ignoring social niceties. “Hokuto-chan, you can call me…” he trailed off. What could she call him? He didn’t think she’d call him by his last name, and he wasn’t sure how he felt about a total stranger calling him by his given name. Almost no one—living or dead—did that anymore.

“I’ll call you Kimi-chan,” she said, “because it sounds cute.”

He stared. And promptly began sputtering.

“Ki—Kimi-chan!” He yelled. “You don’t even know me! Call me ‘Watanuki’ like a normal person would!”

She cocked her head at him. “Why should I?”

“WHAT.”

“You’re not a normal person.” Suddenly she looked quite serious. Briefly she reminded him of Yuuko-san. “People who are not normal need to be aware of it. So, I’m going to call you Kimi-chan. Besides, you’re too uptight.”

“I AM NOT UPTIGHT.” Kimihiro could feel his lungs working like bellows, he was so angry. “Who are you, anyway? I’ve never met you and we’re on some sort of weird first name basis!”

Hokuto smiled brilliantly. “I,” she said, “am Sumeragi Hokuto. And I, Kimi-chan, am your guardian angel.”

Kimihiro stared. “MY WHAT.”

She giggled. “Just joking. Your face was priceless.” 

Kimihiro huffed a little. “Were you looking for me for some reason?”

“Yes.” Her smile faded. “I think we have a lot in common,” she said. “Let’s get something to drink and we can talk about it, all right?”

~~~  
Kimihiro swished his soda around in his can. He had vanilla crème, and Hokuto-chan had orange. They were in the same park where he’d met that warm, motherly woman, and sitting on a bench. Hokuto leaned over her drink, staring into space.

“You and I have something very specific in common,” she said at last. He looked at her. She had sat herself on his left side, so he could see her.

“What’s that?”

She smiled sadly. “We both made sacrifices that no one else really understands.”

He frowned. “I don’t know what….”

“Yes you do.” Her eyes were suddenly like Yuuko’s, wise and all seeing. “Your right eye. You gave it up willingly, didn’t you?”

“How do you know about that?”

She tossed her hair and winked. “It’s my gift! I just know these things. I can read people pretty well. So, tell. You did, didn’t you?”

“It…that wasn’t a sacrifice. Not really.”

“Oho?” Hokuto sounded amused. “What was it then?”

“A balance. I’m the one who got caught in the web. If I hadn’t, Doumeki wouldn’t have had to tear it down, and his eye wouldn’t have been sealed shut in payment. He didn’t need to lose his eye just for me.”

“So it wasn’t a sacrifice? Even though you need your eyes to keep a watch out for harmful spirits, and you already wear glasses—giving up one eye, that’s not a sacrifice?”

Kimihiro paused. “If you phrase it like that, maybe,” he said tersely. She laughed.

“I had a friend once,” she said. “He lost his right eye, too. He stepped between my brother and a crazy woman with a knife, and the knife blinded him. That was willing, too.” She looked at him. “He never called it a sacrifice, either. He wasn’t that sort of person. You see, people get confused. They think ‘to sacrifice’ is the same as being utterly selfless. Giving unconditionally. They think sacrifices are acts one does out of altruism and nothing more.” She spun her soda can around in her hands slowly. “But the kind of sacrifices we’ve made—to sacrifice something for someone else—that isn’t selfless at all. It’s a very selfish thing.”

“How do you get that?”

Hokuto stood up and drained the last of her soda. “Well,” she said, “your eye. You traded it, didn’t you? You gave it up, so that your friend could see.”

“He needs his eyes more than me.” Kimihiro stared down at his soda can, a little mystified. “He practices kyudo, so he needs his eyesight more than I do.”

“You’re being an idiot.”

He looked up and glared at her. “What do you know about it?”

“I know sacrifices.” She crushed her soda can and chucked it toward a trashcan. “My friend, the one I told you about? He said it best. He chose to give up his eye for my brother’s safety. He was being selfish. I was being selfish, too, when I made a sacrifice. Not everyone’s been happy with it, I’m afraid.”

“What did you give up?”

Her smile was an odd cross between wistful and brittle. “Something precious. Something I couldn’t get back. That’s what sacrifices are, you know.” She shook herself. “Anyway! We’re talking about you!”

“It wasn’t a sacrifice,” Kimihiro said again. “It just—it wasn’t fair. Doumeki was just trying to help me, like usual. Because I apparently can’t take care of myself.” He snorted. “It wasn’t fair.”

“Nothing is fair.” She leaned close and caught his face in her hands. It wasn’t the way Yuuko-san would, half teasing and half-sultry; this was more like what a sister might have been like. “You’re a lot like my brother in some ways,” she said. “He didn’t like unfairness, either. But Kimi-chan, life is unfair. So’s the afterlife, for that matter. Bad things happen to good people. It’s the way of the world.”

“He didn’t deserve to lose his eye.”

“Maybe not.” She locked her green eyes with his. “But the spider’s grudge wouldn’t have lasted forever, would it? It would have been lifted eventually. If it wasn’t permanent, why did you give up something for it? Something you couldn’t get back?”

He opened his mouth and closed it again. “It wasn’t fair,” was all he could say. Hokuto leaned forward and kissed his forehead. 

“I know. And nothing we do—no matter how much we sacrifice—can make it fair. We can only do what we can to protect the people we love.” She had tears at the corners of her eyes. “That’s why you gave up your eye, isn’t it? You didn’t want your friend to be hurt. That’s why my friend got in the way of that knife. He didn’t want my brother hurt. That’s why I sacrificed what I did—so that my brother would live. I have hope in that, anyway, but my trust may have been misplaced. All I can do is hope.” She released his face at last and brushed her fingers over his cheeks. “Sacrifices are selfish. We give things up to protect the people we care about, and we hurt them with them at the same time. Sacrifices have prices, Kimi-chan, beyond the sacrifice itself.” 

He looked down into his soda can. It was still mostly full, and felt heavy in his hands. “So, what? I should’ve just let him suffer for something that was my fault?”

“No.” She knelt down in front of him. “But sacrificing your eye for him…Kimi-chan, that’s not something anyone would just shrug off. Did you expect him to say, ‘Hey, thanks, I’ll pay you back with a dinner out?’ You hurt yourself to help him. When you hurt yourself for someone else, it makes them hurt.”

“I don’t know why,” he said. “I yell at him all the time and he calls me an idiot and…”

Hokuto giggled. “And? Just because you aren’t friends on the outside doesn’t mean you aren’t friends in your hearts, Kimi-chan. I knew a man who thought he couldn’t love anyone. He thought he couldn’t be loved, because of the things he’d done. He’d done some really horrible things. But he still has someone who loves him dearly. He loves that person just as much, but if you saw them together, you’d never know. What is on the surface is not always the truth.” She stood up and brushed off her knees. 

“You of all people should know that, Kimi-chan.”

Kimihiro looked away from her eyes. “Yeah,” he said. “I should. I don’t think I do, though.” 

“That’s all right,” she said. “You have people around you that love you, Kimi-chan. Enjoy it. Take pleasure in it. Try not to hurt each other more than necessary.” She ruffled his hair and bent down to kiss his forehead again. “You really do remind me of my brother,” she said. “I haven’t been able to talk to him or anything in such a long time. Thanks for indulging me.”

“Uh,” he said. “It’s been…interesting.”

Hokuto laughed. “Yeah, a lot of people describe me that way.”

“Hokuto-chan…if I can ask….”

“Hm?”

“What did you sacrifice?”

She looked down and stretched her arms in front of her, her fingers interlaced. “My life,” she said. “I could cast a spell, but I had to be dying to do it. So I did.” Hokuto looked back at him, and he could see the tree behind her through her eyes. “Like I said, Kimi-chan. Sacrifices come with a price. For me, it was my life. For my brother, it was the pain of losing me.” Her feet weren’t touching the ground anymore. “Thanks for listening to me,” she said. “My brother deals with spirits every day, but he wouldn’t want to see me. He thinks he does, but I think he would just be angry with me.”

“I don’t know,” Kimihiro said. “If there’s something keeping you here, you may need to see him. I’ve never seen my parents. I’ve been told it’s because they don’t have anything to keep them here. They’re at peace. Maybe…maybe seeing your brother would give you the same.”

She hovered, cradled by an invisible wind, and smiled. “Maybe,” she said. “I’ll think about it, Kimi-chan, if you promise to think about what I said.”

“I will.”

“Good.” She touched his cheek with fingers that felt more like a breeze than flesh, and vanished. He dropped his soda can—still mostly full—into a trashcan on his way out of the park.


End file.
